A whistleblower who previously worked for Ernst & Young, the international auditing firm, has alleged that his bosses turned a blind eye to discoveries that Kaloti Jewellery International – one of the world’s biggest gold companies - dealt in minerals from undocumented sources that may have included conflict zones.

Amjad Rihan, the partner in charge of the audit, resigned from Ernst & Young after he says his firm was pressured by the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) – the government agency that regulates Kaloti – not to reveal its findings.

Rihan turned over some of his documents to Global Witness, an international NGO that resource extraction associated with environmental and human rights abuses as well as corruption.

"I wouldn't be able to come back home at the end of the day and look at my children in the eyes and tell them I'm proud of myself,” Rihan told the BBC. “I will never feel at peace with myself.”

Kaloti Gold was founded by Osama Kaloti, who emigrated from Jerusalem to the emirate of Abu Dhabi in 1968 where he started a scrap metal business. Three years later Abu Dhabi joined the neighboring emirate of Dubai to create a new country called the United Arab Emirates (UAE). When Dubai became a major trading port because of its strategic location between Asia and Europe, Kaloti started to trade in the gold souk (market) in the neighboring city.

Today Kaloti owns a major gold refinery in the country that processes almost half of the gold that is traded in the country. The family business is now worth $32 billion and it continues to buy gold from individuals who show up in the country with large quantities of gold without asking where they obtained the precious metal.

Such behavior is frowned upon under rules prepared in 2010 by the UN Security Council and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that require the companies to track where the minerals came from.

Ernst & Young was hired to check if Kaloti had met two standards - one set by the DMCC and the other set by the London Bullion Markets Association.

"We told them about the severity of our findings as well as our final conclusion which would state that the risk of conflict minerals entering Dubai is extremely high,” Rihan told the BBC. “The Dubai-based regulator was not happy about that, and when they realised that we will not alter our findings, they went ahead and they changed their own guidelines in such a way that our findings and our final conclusions are not made public."

“It’s our view that the Dubai regulator could not have secured a clean audit result from a major gold player without Ernst & Young’s willingness to turn a blind eye,” Annie Dunnebacke, deputy campaigns director at Global Witness said in a statement. “The actions of Ernst & Young and the Dubai regulator, while perfectly legal, undermine trust in the industry at a critical time when progressive new laws to tackle conflict minerals have come into force.”

DMCC denies that it changed its rules to favor Kaloti. "The DMCC strongly refutes any allegation that it pressured EY, that it sought to influence or interfere with the review process or that it softened the review process to favour any member refinery,” the agency in a statement.